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[The following is a paper submitted for a Husserl Archive seminar, in May 2006 . It will prove helpful for a forthcoming account of Deleuze's critique of Husserl.]
Husserl’s Complex Intention and Its Unintended Tension:
The Ambiguous Constitution of Consciousness Happening Now
“Upon closer reading, all those utterances of Husserl
which we have drawn upon concerning the phenomenon
of time-consciousness, prove to be ambivalent.”
(Rudolf Bernet “Is the Present Ever Present?
Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence” 110)
Husserl’s ambivalence in regard to the purity or impurity of the Now plays a role in Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s semiology and metaphysics in “Speech and Phenomena.” Elsewhere, I will look more at this critique; in the following, however, I will examine sections in Husserl’s The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, along with several relevant passages in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, to see if in them Husserl regards consciousness happening now to be an act happening in a pure moment such that the act of consciousness may intend its very self or be immanent to itself, or, if it is that consciousness happening now is interwoven with acts of consciousness that are not happening now such that consciousness happening now cannot be seen to occupy a pure instant during which it may intend itself or be immediately present to itself. The interpretation I offer of the passages describing his method of coming to consciousness of consciousness’ stream will suggest that in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Husserl does seem to regard consciousness happening now as sharing its constitution with consciousness that is not happening now. Thus, at least in regard to these passages, consciousness happening now is not a pure moment that can stand apart from its co-constituent acts of consciousness that have already happened or that have yet happened. However, in light of certain other passages in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, we may be compelled to wonder if Husserl made room for the possibility of such a pure moment, on the grounds that he seems to maintain metaphysical presuppositions about the actual existence and presence of consciousness and its objects that happen now. I hope to make the case (which was inspired by Rudolf Bernet’s “Is the Present Ever Present?”) that Husserl does seem to maintain an ambivalence on this matter, and I hope to find much of my more compelling evidence for this in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.
To make this case, I will begin first by looking at sections 31 to 33 of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology and related passages in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time to give Husserl’s account that consciousness that is happening now and that is consciousness of its stream is correlated with an actual now, but is itself so thoroughly interwoven with acts of consciousness that happened in prior now moments, that it cannot be said to be an occurrence that is fully itself in a pure instant. But after establishing that, I will examine passages that seem to indicate that consciousness happening now has a privileged status that could lead us to conclude that it can be taken apart from the other acts of consciousness. Afterwards, I will look first at passages in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time that seem to confirm this position that consciousness happening now is too enmeshed with consciousness happening prior and subsequently that it cannot be taken by itself. Then, I will discuss passages that lend to what seems to be his ambivalence on the matter, for in these other passages he seems to indicate that consciousness happening now happens contemporaneously with an actual now whose objects are actually present and existent, and for this reason, consciousness happening now has a privileged status over the others, and itself may be metaphysically distinct, which raises confusion on how something that exists can be enmeshed along a continuum with something that does not. Thus, I begin now by looking at this thoroughly enmeshed continuum of acts of consciousness.
In sections 31 to 33 of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Husserl discusses the extensive interconnectedness and fluid movement of consciousness, and the way the phenomenological method may serve as a means to come to be aware of this stream-like feature of consciousness. In Section 31, Husserl returns, from his previous digression, to the “main direction” of his concerns, among which is the establishment of phenomenology as a science. The objects investigated in this science would be consciousness, acts of consciousness, and phenomenological datum. Husserl classifies the objectivities of this field of investigation as being either individual particularities that are absolutely self-given through phenomenological perception, or, as objectivities that “come to us through phenomenological retention, recollection, expectation, and empathy” (67).
The intentional structure through which the objectivities that come to us, namely, the intentional, retentional, protensional structure, will be one focus of our treatment, so I will proceed to provide some of the relevant details regarding this structure, by drawing from Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. In this text, Husserl speaks of consciousness as having “running off modes of an immanent temporal object” which have “a beginning, a source-point, so to speak. This is the running-off mode with which the immanent object begins to exist. It is characterized as now” (30). This now “changes into a past,” because a new now “is always entering on the scene” (30). This running-off happens in a “steady progression,” and each phase of it “is itself a continuity, a continuity that constantly expands, a continuity of pasts” (30). These past acts of consciousness that were once happening now are retained as retentions in a continuous series “pertaining to the beginning-point” which is the “impresssional consciousness” that is “constantly flowing” and that “passes over into ever new retentional consciousness” (31) And, not only does consciousness extend into its past, but it extends into its future as well, in the form of protensions; for, he says, “[e]very process that constitutes its object originally is animated by protentions that emptily constitute what is coming as coming, that catch it and bring it toward fulfillment” (54). Thus, for Husserl, consciousness happening now happens across a steady continuum of acts of consciousness, and those that have passed relative to the ones now happening are retained and available to consciousness for recollection; while at the same time, part of the structure of consciousness happening now is its protended anticipation of what it expects to later enter into consciousness happening now.
If we return to The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, we find that Husserl describes a method for consciousness happening now to come to an awareness of its stream of fluidly transitioning temporal phases. We will look now at this method to see if it indicates that Husserl takes consciousness happening now to occur in a pure instant, or if, rather, consciousness happening now can only be viewed as being at least partly constituted by consciousness happening previously and subsequently.
We noted before that among the objects investigated in a phenomenological science are phenomenological objects. Husserl explains that these objects are not isolated; rather, they accompany an “objective background,” which contains objectivities that were apprehended along with the intended object (Basic Problems of Phenomenology 68); however, they were not thematically intended in that prior act. Despite their not having been previously intended thematically, these previously non-thematically intended objects that accompanied the thematically intended ones can be thematically intended retrospectively by first recollecting the previously thematically intended object and then attending to its background, which contains the yet-thematically intended objects (69).
Husserl explains in Section 33 of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology how this method of attending to non-thematically intended intentional backgrounds can bring consciousness happening now into an awareness of its unified, stream-like structure and movement. He explains that when we direct our phenomenological perception at our acts of consciousness (cogitationes), then these acts of consciousness are self-present for as long as we perceive them this way (71). When one act of consciousness has expired, its trace is retended, but, it fades away. However, the retention may occur in such a way that the fading act of consciousness is connected to a new one, resulting in a consciousness of a succession of acts of consciousness. When we have a recollection of this series of acts of consciousness, it is as though we are re-living our prior perception of the acts of consciousness (71). Along with this temporal background of intentions, there is also a simultaneous background which would be those objects that one perceived, but only marginally and non-thematically (72). By attending to these yet-thematized retended and protended backgrounds, we may connect all acts of consciousness and their objects into a unified stream extending, to a great extent, before and after us. Thus, we can renew the phenomenological experience of the unified stream of consciousness by recollecting a previous act of consciousness along with its unintended simultaneous or successive background, and in so regarding their inter-connectedness, come again to an awareness of the stream (72). Although unclear memories may seem to pose an obstacle to a consciousness of the stream, they can be made clear by remembering a clearer memory connected with the unclear one; this way one is able to reconnect the continuous stream of consciousness (73).
From this description of the method of arriving at an awareness of the unified stream of consciousness, it would seem, that in this way, Husserl considers consciousness happening now to happen not in an isolatable and momentary act of consciousness; but, he seems instead to view it as spanning a temporal duration that is so interconnected with its past and future temporal backgrounds that it cannot be taken in isolation from these backgrounds without the sacrifice of some part of its constitution. In other words, consciousness happening now shares its constitution with consciousness happening previously and subsequently. A close look at the mechanisms and structure of intentional consciousness can make clear this complex temporal structure of consciousness: 1) consciousness happening now is temporally coordinated with an actual Now, 2) regardless of what can be said about the metaphysical features of the actual Now, as far as consciousness happening now is concerned, it can be said that it is steadily and continually undergoing the alteration of passing away as consciousness happening now moves forward into a fluidly renewing now phase, 3) consciousness happening now retains the acts of consciousness, along with their objects, that were experienced by consciousness happening prior, and as well, consciousness happening now protends that of which it expects to be conscious in following acts of consciousness happening now, 4) consciousness happening now can come to be aware that extending temporally behind, through, and in front of itself is one unified stream of consciousness, and it can come to this awareness by thematically intending what outlies in the temporal or simultaneous background of the thematized objects of acts of consciousness or the acts themselves that happened prior, 5) by doing so, consciousness happening now comes to regard itself as inextricably interwoven with acts of consciousness that happened prior and that are yet to come; thus 6) consciousness happening now does not occur within an isolatable, self-contained, pure, self-identical, singular moment, because it spans a duration over which it undergoes alteration and transformation. But does that mean that Husserl is not ambivalent on this matter? And, if consciousness happening now shares its constitution with consciousness happening previously and subsequently to itself to the same extent that consciousness happening previously shared its constitution with its temporally neighboring acts of consciousness (including this aforementioned consciousness happening now) and also to the same extent that consciousness happening subsequently will share its constitution with its temporally neighboring acts of consciousness (also including that aforementioned consciousness happening now), then would that mean that Husserl is content to give them all equal status?
However, if we look at the “as-it-were” nature of the recollection of retentions, we could perhaps detect their having a lower status than acts of consciousness happening now. Husserl explains in section 33 of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology that it is possible that we may recollect retended acts of consciousness (or “cogitationes”), and in so doing,
[o]nce again, we live through, as it were, the seeing of each of the cogitationes, once again each one of them begins and perdures, with its flowing Now and its retinue of fading past phases. But only ‘as it were.’ This ‘being given again, as it were’ is the character of the recollection. (71)
If retended acts of consciousness can be given again to consciousness happening now, but only as if they were actually present, and if these retended acts of consciousness themselves were once actually present but are now not and thus are at best “as-it-were” actually present, then consciousness happening now may be the only act of consciousness along the continuum that has access to what is actually present for its intentioning, and furthermore, consciousness happening now may be the only act of consciousness that itself is not “as it were,” and thus consciousness happening now may be the only act of consciousness that is actual, really existent, and present. And, if consciousness happening now is present while at the same time being actively conscious, then it itself might be available to itself for its own self-intentional relationship, which would mean that it could be seen to be a self-contained, self-identical self-relationship; and, therefore it would be a self-identification that may be taken in isolation to what we before took to be its co-constituent temporal neighbors; because, these temporal neighbors themselves were or will be actually happening now in such a way that they were or will be also self-identifiable, and if we have a sequence of self-identifying acts of consciousness, then we also have a means to take them in isolation to each other, at least on these grounds. If the identity of an act of consciousness happening now is contained fully within itself and not spread across a continuum, then part of its constitution could not be found exclusively in other acts of consciousness. However, we saw already that Husserl also seems to say, contrary to this second line of thinking in which acts of consciousness happening now could be self-available for self-intention in a non-temporally extended moment, that no act of consciousness happening now is without neighboring acts of consciousness that all partly constitute each other.[1] This could be one way that Husserl’s position on the constitution and status of consciousness happening now may be seen to contain a tension within itself between its trait of inseparability with it co-constitutative neighbors, on the one hand, and its seeming isolatability from them, on the other.
Thus, we see a possible interpretation of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology in which we find an ambivalence in Husserl’s position on the identity of consciousness happening now. In the following, I will address some passages in his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time that also seem to lend to this claim (many of the passages I locate I first came across as citations in articles written by commentators, which are included in the bibliography).
In certain passages, Husserl seems to confirm that consciousness happening now is found along an unbroken continuum along which are acts of consciousness not happening now. For example, in regard to a perception of a tone, he explains that “[t]he tone appears intuitively as temporally extended,” but “which at only one point has the character of sensation, and, in being continuously shaded off, has a modified character for the rest of the points” (241). He continues:
in each further cross section, as long as the tone still belongs to the cross section’s intentional content, the tone is indeed still represented in the form of an extension, but of an extension without a boundary provided by sensation. (241)
Had the tone stopped, there would have been its continuum from the past that would terminate with a sensation that does not sense the tone (but perhaps another tone or something else altogether). Thus, it would seem that the acts of consciousness through which the tone was previously given lead up, “without a boundary,” to the perception of the now-happening consciousness of the tone. Husserl seems to imply this in what follows in the passage:
[w]hat has been pointed out about the apprehension-contents is also true of the apprehensions: to the sensation corresponds the perceptual consciousness as consciousness of the now. To the gradually shaded apprehension-contents correspond the different levels of apprehensions within a phase; and in the union of these different levels, which is an intentional union, the original past becomes constituted—constituted as continuously connected to the perceived now. (241)
The important phrase here is “continuously connected to the perceived now,” which would seem to indicate that acts of consciousness happening now do not move across a determinate transition point dividing what is certainly now, actual, and present, and what is certainly past, not-actual, and not-present; rather, it would seem that if they are “continuously connected” that the transition is one of degree, or that there never is such a transition in actuality.
However, in other passages of On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Husserl seems to indicate that there is such a definite transition and that it is not one of degree. In these passages, he seems to maintain presuppositions about time, namely, that there is an actual now to which consciousness happening now corresponds and during which something now exists and is present, and outside of which something is not actually present or existent; for, he says about memory in On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time:
[w]hat is remembered, of course, does not now exist—otherwise it would not be something that has been but something present; and in memory (retention) it is not given as now, otherwise memory, or retention, would precisely not be memory but perception (or respectively, primal impression). (36)
On these grounds, “‘[p]ast’ and ‘now’ exclude one another” (36). Thus, Husserl associates consciousness happening now with what he sometimes calls “the actual ‘now’” (32), and he seems to give a metaphysical priority to the actual now in that he regards it to be the temporal place for the actual existence and presence of objects of consciousness happening now. So, even if we take him at his word when he says that he is interested “in experiences of time” and not whether they are “fixed in objective time” because “we can know nothing about it,” (10) we may wonder still to what extent a metaphysics of presence may play a role in his understanding of temporal consciousness and how this may lend to the interpretation that consciousness happening now may occur in a pure instant and is isolatable from the other acts of consciousness, on these grounds. For, if consciousness happening now occurs in a moment that is metaphysically distinguishable from the moments that correspond to other acts of consciousness, on account of the now moment being the only temporal place where things happening during it have actual existence and presence, the consciousness happening now, which happens in this privileged place, may itself be distinguishable from the other acts of consciousness along the stream, in that consciousness happening now is the only act of consciousness that actually exists and is present, while the others are re-presented or pre-presented, which would make the transition from present to not present difficult to understand, if that transition happens along a continuum.
I find Husserl’s metaphor of the comet’s head and tail to lend to this seeming ambivalence. He explains:
During the time that a motion is being perceived, a grasping-as-now takes place moment by moment; and in this grasping, the actually present phase of the motion itself becomes constituted. But this now-apprehension is, as it were, the head attached to the comet’s tail of retentions related to the earlier now-points of the motion. (On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time 32)
Here he makes the distinction between the now-apprehension and the retentions of a motion by designating the former as the comet’s “head” and the latter as its “tail.” But, there does not seem to be a commitment to explaining the specifics of the connection between the two. It could be that they are separate but conjoined; yet this would seem to run counter to his description of the continuous connection between them (241). Or, it could be that they are continuously connected, but if that were so, then there would not be a clear transition point between them, which runs counter to his claim that “‘[p]ast’ and ‘now’ exclude one another” (36). If consciousness happening now does make a transition to a state of not happening now and of not actually existing and being present, then how does that transition take place if it is not an abrupt transition (which would call the continuum-feature of the stream in question)? Or, if the transition does happen gradually, does the transition ever fully complete itself, and if it does happen gradually but without an abrupt transition, then are we not dealing with something akin to a paradox of Zeno? For, if the transition is complete but gradual, would we not at some point of the gradual transition move from partly existent to entirely not existent, which would be an abrupt transition?
Thus, we seem to encounter a tension when we, on the one hand, take consciousness happening now as being partly constituted by consciousness happening previously and subsequently, and when we, on the other hand, also take consciousness happening now to be actual, existent, and present, and consciousness not happening now not to be actual, existent, and present. If there is a continuum, then there are no breaks; and, if there are no breaks, then consciousness happening now would not be isolatable from acts of consciousness happening previously or subsequently. If there are no breaks between the composition of acts of consciousness along the stream, then the constitution of one act is found partly within its temporally neighboring acts. Thus, if consciousness happening now is taken to be actual, existent, and present, then its immediate temporally neighboring acts also share in this actuality, existence, and presence, whose neighbors do as well, whose neighbors do as well, and so on. Thus, a distinction between actual, existing, present acts of consciousness and ones that are not actual, existing, and present would seem impossible. However, Husserl seems to indicate that such a distinction is inherent to the structure. He seems to reserve a special place for acts of consciousness happening now as being exclusively actual, existent, and present. I wonder if it is from this presumption of consciousness happening now as actual, existent, and present, that allows Husserl to regard consciousness happening now as being immanent to itself such that it can make an expression that is immediately intuited by itself and not mediated over a stretch of time (a topic I will further explore elsewhere). I hope to have successfully accounted for how we may uncover Husserl’s ambivalence on the matter, which results in a tension within his structuring of temporal consciousness, and I hope to have added a small bit to research on this issue that has already been done with On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, by taking a close look at some sections in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. In addition, I hope to have come to a clear enough articulation of Husserl’s seeming ambivalence on the issue of temporal consciousness, such that I can successfully evaluate Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s metaphysics and semiology in my next effort.
Works Cited
Bernet, Rudolf. “Is the Present Ever Present? Phenomenology and the
Metaphysics of Presence.” Research in Phenomenology, 12 (1982) p.85.
Husserl,
Winter Semester, 1910-1911. From the German “Aus den Vorlesungen, Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Wintersemester 1910/1911” in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjectivität, Husserliana XIII, edited by Iso Kern. Vol. 12 of Edmund Husserl: Collected Works. Ed. Rudolf Bernet. Trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart.
Husserl,
(1893-1917). Vol 4 of Edmund Husserl: Collected Works. Ed. Rudolf Bernet. Trans. John Barnett Brough.
Bibliography
Brough, John. “The Emergence of an Absolute Consciousness in Husserl’s Early
Writings on Time-Consciousness.” Man and World 5(3) (1972): 298-326. Rpt. in The Nexus of Phenomena: Intentionality, Perception and Temporality. Vol 3 of Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Ed. Rudolf Bernet, Donn Welton, and Gina Zavota.
Brough, John. “Husserl on Memory.” The Monist 59 (1976): 40-62. Rpt. in The
Nexus of Phenomena: Intentionality, Perception and Temporality. Vol 3 of Edmund Husserl: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Ed. Rudolf Bernet, Donn Welton, and Gina Zavota.
[1] Unless, there is an additional layer of consciousness whose constitution in not enmeshed with the temporal background of the act of consciousness happening now. If this is so, then another consciousness, which I suppose would not undergo a continuum of alteration like the temporally coordinated would be able to be conscious of the stream of consciousness. Thus, consciousness happening now can be within the consciousness of another consciousness that is self-identical and not temporally specific, and thus while the stream of consciousness flows, it is possible that, because the unchanging consciousness is conscious of all points along the stream including the consciousness happening now, that during consciousness happening now, there is a relationship to a non-temporally conditioned consciousness, which would mean that from the perspective of their correlation, there is a way for one’s consciousness to be in a relationship with itself without a passage of an extension of time. If this interpretation or something similar is preferable to the one I give in this paper, then much of my work has been in vain, but perhaps the same can be said for Derrida’s critique, which seems also not to take this into account. So when elsewhere I treat of Derrida’s critique, I will look more into this possibility as a possible defense of Husserl.
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